Are women really the enemy?
With all the readings in our class and with information outside of it, I can't help but to think that everywhere we turn....Women are perceived as the enemy in every aspect that they are portrayed. Joan of Arc is a heretic for standing up for what she believed her cause to be, Feminists who fight for women's rights are described as defiant and/or lesbians (which carries a negative connotation), and in our discussion today on "Portrait of a Monster" it happened again. A man cheats on his fiance, marries someone else and yet is absolved of his crime simply because a woman put a spell on him. The moral of that story was not to trust women because they are "Little worms like leeches that suck the blood from your soul and your conscience." Later they refer to women as a "Basilisk" and as poisonous snakes. I guess the point of the matter is that when women try to take charge of their autonomy or livelihood, they are quickly ostracized and sent to the wolves to punish.
This constant theme of "women as the enemy" that we see throughout the centuries suggest a kind of defense mechanism against a threat they may pose to man. What threat is that? A good place to start would be Freud's concept of "castration anxiety"
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I think this whole idea of women being portrayed as the enemy goes back to one of our central themes of this class, which is the inferior regard of women. As we learned in class,women were seen as physically inferior to man, with differing levels of heat and such. And therefore, when the authors of these stories need to create an antagonist that the majority will agree with, maybe it is easier to have it be the woman where most people wouldn't argue. And I highly doubt women were literate at the time so even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to read the stories that portray their gender so negatively.
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